Richard II studies what happens to a king whose belief of absoluteness was betrayed by the body politics, and above all, by himself. Dealing with the deposition of an orthodox king, the play suggests that the acknowledgement of the absolute in the person of the king had only ever been ceremonial and reversible, since what the body politic wants is merely a show of the absolute. Being stripped of his title, as a remarkable poet king, Richard remains only a king of words. And his power of words and imagination leads him for the first time in his life to wonder just who he is and who the king is. But he cannot really think of himself as anything other than king. Finally, he ends with an assertion of his own identity and the significance of his death. But as the meaning of his death depends on the identity he gave away, Richard is paradoxical to the end. Thus, the play dramatizes the trauma of a poet king’s deposition. And King Richard’s trauma suggests that kingship consists of two statements : ‘king is king’ and ‘king is very human’, but these two tatements are not contradictory but complementary.